oil-drop

“Some of our favorites -- the oil-drop paperweight ($125), the 1997 Al Gore Hammer Award for innovative achievements ($100) and Petey the Petroleum Loving Whale ($50) -- were quickly bid up to the asking prices.”

The Washington Post: 43 top agency jobs remain unfilled

“When Robert Millikan conducted his famous oil-drop experiments in 1910 and 1911, his purpose was to measure the electric charge on an electron.”

Simon & Schuster: The Nature of Technology

“Soon thereafter (in 1912) Robert A. Millikan made the first precision measurement of the electron charge with the oil-drop method, which led to a Physics Prize for him in 1923.”

The Nobel Prizes in Physics 1901-2000

“Robert A. Millikan (1868–1953) established that electric charge always consists of an integral multiple of a unit charge, which he determined with great accuracy in his oil-drop experiment.”

1910-13

“This outcome necessitated the revision of the Millikan oil-drop value from 4.774 to 4.803 X 10-10 e.s.u. (revealing that systematic errors had been made in the measurement of the viscosity of air, a quantity entering into the oil-drop method).”

Arthur H. Compton - Biography

“But you cannot mix with it mentally; -- You circulate only as an oil-drop in its current.”

Two Years in the French West Indies

“The famed oil-drop experiment of 1909 demonstrated that electrical charge was quantized, and by implication proved the existence of subatomic particles.”

Armed and Dangerous

“Among other anecdotes, Goodstein discusses Millikan’s oil-drop experiment, cold fusion, the case of Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories, a little-known case where a Caltech postdoc apparently falsified a figure in a paper, and the successful discovery of high-temperature superconductivity.”

Cautionary tales from the front lines of science - The Panda's Thumb